The Age of Tezcatlipoca

John Bierhorst's translation of the Codex Chimalpopoca, a colonial-era Nahuatl manuscript compiling the text known as the Legend of the Suns, opens the cycle of world ages with Tezcatlipoca ruling as the sun, an age the text names 4-Jaguar for the day sign on which it fell. The earth in this first age was said to be inhabited by giants, a race of enormous, powerful beings distinct from ordinary humanity, who lived under Tezcatlipoca's light before catastrophe overtook them.

The age ended when jaguars, animals closely associated with Tezcatlipoca throughout Aztec religion as a form the god himself could take, devoured the giants outright, extinguishing the sun and plunging the world back into darkness before the gods set the next age in motion. Miguel Leon-Portilla's Aztec Thought and Culture situates this destruction within a broader Nahua cosmological pattern in which each sun falls to a disaster fitting the character of the deity who ruled it, a pattern the four ages that follow the First Sun continue in turn. Nahuatl sources call the giants of the First Sun quinametzin, a term that recurs across several colonial accounts of the Five Suns independent of which specific god or disaster a given source assigns to the age, suggesting the giants themselves were a comparatively stable element of the tradition even where other details, including the ruling god's identity in some variant tellings, were not.